Traditionally, incisions are made into a patient's body in order to access a patient's surgical region. Often, these incisions are made large enough to accommodate the insertion and removal of various implants, instruments and other objects. Such incisions provide unrestricted access through the patient's skin, and to the patient's anatomy at and around the surgical region. Such free access to and movement within the patient's body may provide certain advantages, but can increase the invasiveness of the procedure and can expose the patient to additional risks, for example, due to the various moving objects during surgery undesirably making contact with the patient, for example, at areas other than the surgical site.
To this end, access systems such as tubular access ports have been developed to provide enhanced targeting and accuracy to the patient's surgical region of interest. These ports can be used in minimally-invasive or percutaneous surgical procedures. For instance, microsurgical spinal bone resections and spinal decompressions, to name a few surgical procedures, are performed under microscopic view through openings in miniature percutaneous tubular access ports. Rather than inserting implants, instruments, objects, and even body parts (e.g., surgeon's hands) freely into the patient's body via the incision, the tubular access port is inserted through the incision and stabilized at or near the patient's surgical region, leaving a proximal end of the tubular access port accessible from above the patient's skin. Once inserted, the tubular access port provides a working channel from the patient's skin to the surgical site and protects and prevents trauma to, for example, bone, tissue, and nerves by objects being moved to and from the surgical site through the access port.
These tubular access ports are designed to have lengths capable of reaching the surgical region while being accessible from outside of the patient's skin or incision. Because the tubular access port is used for various surgeries, in order to access a number of surgical regions located at varying depths in the patient's body, traditional tubular access ports are manufactured in many sizes to achieve the desired surgical objective. Manufacturers of these access ports are thus tasked with developing and maintaining adequate supplies of a large variety of access tubes, each of which can have varying specifications (e.g., lengths). Adequate machinery and human supervision is required to oversee the manufacturing of a large and diverse portfolio of access ports. Likewise, traditional surgical centers such as hospitals are left with the burden of purchasing and storing a large and diverse inventory of access ports, in order to be prepared to use the adequate-length access port for any surgery at any given time.